My wife and I have been on a buying binge lately. We’ve been buying toys for Nathan. We are buying stuff that Nathan likes, like his parrot (OK, that one was a gift from friends):
and his elephant:
But we’re also getting him stuff like his donuts:
He’s also got a zillion electronic widgets that blink and beep and sing and do all kinds of things – but funnily enough, he seems to like the simple ones best.
This seems to jive with this article I read on whattoexpect.com. We are so advanced these days that we think the kid’s toys have to light up and sing a song and dance a jig for him for the baby to be interested in it, but Nathan’s favorite toys (so far) are his colored donuts, his colored blocks, and little plush toys (mostly birds – ducks and parrots are the best!). I remember when I was growing up that my favorite toy before the age of 5 were a set of paper bricks – literally little cardboard boxes with the outside having graphics of red bricks so that when you stacked them tjhey looked like brick walls. I think I must’ve spent hours stacking them up then knocking and kicking them down. Loads of fun, that.
Before Nathan was born, I read Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina and one of the anecdotes that the author told was how one year, he opened some fancy toy for his two boys for their Christmas gift, and to his surprise, disappointment, then delight, the boys were infinitely more excited about the boxes the toys came in and they had a grand old time converting those boxes into all kinds of other toys as dictated by their imagination. I was reminded of that story when I saw this on Facebook from a feed of a buddy of mine:
Sorry Alex, but I had to post this – this was too adorable. My buddy made an Optimus Prime costume for his son out of these boxes – the idea was the boy’s, only the scissoring was by his dad. This is just too awesome. I can’t wait until Nathan’s old enough.
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